Review of Plan for Chaos, John Wyndham (2009)

A photojournalist in 1950s New York is appalled to discover that a series of women, each one looking identical to his fiance, are being killed. He's even more appalled when the deaths turn out to be merely part of a convoluted Nazi plot to take over the US, led by his aunt.

Chosen because: seen in the science fiction section of Waterstone bookshop, Oxford


When I saw a 'new' John Wynham novel on the shelves of the science fiction section at Waterstones in Oxford, I had to buy it straight away. Wynham's classic novels - The Day of the Triffids, The Midwich Cuckoos, and all the rest of them - were some of the first science fiction that I ever read, and I put one of his short stories down as responsible for my current profession (it's the one in which a Soviet botanist dies in mysterious circumstances on the Moon, for those of you that know it).

Plan for Chaos was in fact apparently one of his earlier novels, one that he was working on at the time of The Day of the Triffids, and which he put to one side without re-drafting when The Day of the Triffids was accepted for publication.

The story line is frankly rather silly - the type of thing that Clive Cussler would be using for a Dirk Pitt adventure if he hadn't already done Nazis to death. A top-ranking Nazi has escaped at the end of the war, and developed a new technology for IVF and human embryo growth (in a very similar way to Huxley's Brave New World). She uses it to grow a master race of identical young Nazis, all of whom are genetically her children, who are going about taking over the world in a mysterious and roundabout way.

Our hero, a young photographer for a New York newspaper, is appalled to see a photograph of a dead woman who is identical to his fiance (and cousin) Frieda. He's even more appalled when he discovers that a whole string of women, all of them identical to Frieda and each other, are being found dead across New York. Then Frieda disappears...

Its fair enough to begin by saying that it's not great. Wyndham has hit the problem that (as I speedily discovered in writing my first novel) people locked up in a prison for chapters on end are not especially thrilling. Even when the people holding the hero and heroine prisoner are Nazi clones in an underground bunker, you can still get very fed up of people stuck in one place.

I'm always particularly interested by the speculative and predictive aspects of Wyndham's novels - the social effects of rising sea levels in The Kraken Wakes, the political effects of increased life spans in Trouble with Lichen - and this one doesn't have the same intellectual punch. Some of the ideas haven't aged particularly well - in particular, the horror of the hero and heroine at the idea of IVF per se seems rather unnecessary today - and having been primed by Lois McMaster Bujold's Ethan of Athos, I was extremely dubious about who had actually looked after all these clones in their early years.

The result is a novel which is most interesting as a comparison with Wyndham's other writing, in order to see what he gets right so often elsewhere, rather than as a good read in itself.